formulated a plan. He went to find Penny, the many-splendoured leader of the entire organisation. As he ventured along the wine-dark carpet, the cunning Todd heard an entrancing noise. It was the siren call of whispered gossip between two of his colleagues, and Todd was unable to stop himself drawing closer. Before long, Todd had forgotten his original purpose in setting out. There he would have remained if he had not seen the many-splendoured leader of the entire organisation herself walking past and been reminded of his mission. The devious Todd broke away from the gossipers and approached Penny. He explained to her that he needed her help to find space in the meeting-filled calendars of his colleagues. Penny, who knew Todd from the time they worked together at CoreWeave, agreed to his plan. So the crafty Todd returned to his desk and sent a new swift-footed message to everyone, saying that the many-splendoured leader of the organisation would now be attending his fortnightly council of war, and affirming that it would be happening at the original time. Shiny-headed Harold, Moira of the tattooed arms and the rest of them all accepted the invitation without further question, for nothing matters more to office-bound mortals than proximity to the C-suite. The resourceful Todd sent another swift-footed message to the mischievous Penny, saying that the plan had worked and that, as agreed, there was no need for her to actually attend his council. With the keepers of the meeting-filled calendars so tricked, the crafty Todd was filled with great joy. ■ Step inside the world of work with our Bartleby newsletter. Each week our white-collar oracle muses on the agonies of office life. This article was downloaded by zlibrary from https://www.economist.com//business/2026/07/02/the-toddyssey
Show a liberal a Lime bike and he will show you his soul Are the e-bikes a paragon of liberalism or an abomination? July 2nd 2026 These days it can be hard to know what a liberal really believes. Thankfully a simple test throws light on their soul. It is similar to the one Hermann Rorschach designed in the 1920s. Though instead of putting the subject in front of an ambiguous inkblot and waiting for them to say something profound about their mother, wheel in a white and green Lime Gen4 electric bike, found stacked by the dozen on city streets around the world, let their eyes settle on it and gently ask: “What do you see?” “That is the paragon of liberal capitalism!” exclaims the first subject. What’s not to love? The Lime rider accelerates quickly and without effort. He feels good about his carbon footprint and better about being spared the
collectivism of public transport. Each bike is an advert for creative destruction: if even the humble bicycle can be improved by innovation, anything can. Since Lime bikes are “dockless”, which allows the rider to leave them pretty much anywhere, the bikes bestow on riders of only modest means the highest of modern luxuries: nonchalance in travel. One liberal’s casual dismount is another’s brazen incivility. “That is the devil!” the second subject shouts. Electric bikes have made pavement indistinguishable from road. Accidents are common enough that “Lime leg” has entered the vernacular. In London even the most genteel public spaces are dominated by neon-green handle-bars. So many descended on Wimbledon this week that the council threatened to seize them. On a recent morning Old Burlington Street in Mayfair was blocked with a great number of Limes parked on the pavement and road. In the mêlée stood a few Voi bikes, a pinkish-coloured Swedish competitor, and the odd Forest, a less offensively green British one, which appeared to have lost their way. If the subject has even a mild reactionary inclination, such a sight will cause it to erupt immediately. The two positions are irreconcilable. Even the initial fence-sitter (“I wouldn’t mind them if they were prettier”) will soon leap onto one side or the other. Subjects of the first kind accuse the second of being stick-in-the- muds who are unprepared for the changes technology will soon bring. The second subject thinks the first would live in the squalor of downtown San Francisco so long as their food delivery arrives on time. What are you looking at when you are looking at a Lime? For one, a relic of the tech bubble that popped when central banks raised interest rates in 2022. Lime eventually went public on July 1st, after years of waiting. Countless “micro-mobility” firms have gone bust. Ofo, a Chinese company that once dumped thousands of yellow bikes in the West, is long gone. Jump, Uber’s attempt at shared e-bikes, was folded into Lime in 2020. Bird, a one-time e- scooter unicorn, declared bankruptcy in 2023 (though it has since re- emerged). Some combination of pricing competition and asset depreciation was always to blame. Lime says it has solved these problems: it gets five years of wear out of its bikes and is cashflow-positive. Still, the firm was forced to list to pay off its heavy debts.
To fully comprehend the Lime bike examine its genealogy. Shared bikes have their origins on the political left: in the 1960s Dutch drifters painted some white and left them unlocked. But Lime’s more recent ancestors are the state-sponsored schemes which emerged in the 2000s. London’s “Boris bikes”, formally called “Santander cycles”, are Lime’s docked forebears (unsurprisingly, their usage has languished recently). Limes have unruly, and often illegal, cousins in the super-fast jerry-rigged food-delivery bikes which now career unchallenged around cities. And a major benefactor in Uber, the kingpin of the delivery economy, which is Lime’s largest investor and is responsible for 14% of Lime’s revenue by offering the bikes through its app. If the Lime bike has a philosophy it is convenience absolutism. That was a more explicit mantra in Silicon Valley in the 2010s than it is today, but is still the true idée fixe of the place. In some cities Amazon can now deliver groceries in less than half an hour (thanks to its own electric bike). Agentic commerce is billed as the forefront of artificial intelligence, but is also the cutting edge of food delivery. The dominance of convenience also means the decline of ownership. And so much of the anti-social nature of electric bikes is a result of that. “Why did you park your Lime bike there?” one might ask. “It’s not my bike.” Often the politics of business is merely the politics of the road. Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, is also its richest car salesman. Europe’s industrial crisis is mostly a panic about Chinese electric vehicles. But the politics of bikes is particularly brutal: “Zo stops charging speeding e-bike riders,” yelled the front page of the New York Post in March, accusing Zohran Mamdani, the city’s mayor, of protecting delivery drivers at the expense of pedestrians. Partly that is because they are a ubiquitous nuisance. But also because complaining about the super-fast ones food-delivery drivers use is about the only way liberals can complain about the illegal immigrants who often ride them. If the electric bike is the great symbol of state failure, crushing them is a way for the state to recover the appearance of strength. Police forces in America, Australia and Britain have all filmed themselves pulverising electric bikes and scooters deemed too fast or dangerous. Better the electric bike you know? Perhaps: a crackdown on illegal ones should benefit legal outfits like Lime, goes one argument. Yet Lime, too, suffers the big
consequences of small politics. In 2023 Paris voted to ban dockless e- scooters. States write their own safety rules. Licensing for bikes can be devolved to an absurd extent. Each of London’s 32 boroughs has its own rules, causing stacks of one operator’s bikes at their boundaries. A ridiculous sight. But an increasingly familiar one. ■ Subscribers to The Economist can sign up to our Opinion newsletter, which brings together the best of our leaders, columns, guest essays and reader correspondence. This article was downloaded by zlibrary from https://www.economist.com//business/2026/07/01/show-a-liberal-a-lime-bike-and-he- will-show-you-his-soul
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Finance & economics | Our summer BBQ index How much will a 4th of July cookout cost this year? We calculate the rising price of Americans’ summer staples July 2nd 2026 FEW THINGS sit closer to the heart of Americana than the hamburger. In the early 1970s John Updike, an acute observer of American life, described the country as “a hamburger kingdom, one cuisine, under God, indivisible, with pickles and potato chips for all”. At the time, the hamburger was a democratic meal: cheap, plentiful and available to almost everyone. That kind of meal is getting harder to find lately. Grocery prices in America are 30% or so higher than in early 2020, before the covid-19 pandemic. This adds about $1,600 to the average household’s annual food bill. Average wages have risen by a similar amount, leaving the overall affordability of groceries little changed.
However, that aggregate masks sharp and unpredictable increases in the prices of some staples, which consumers tend to notice particularly. A recent survey by the Kitchen Table Project, an advocacy group, found groceries to be Americans’ biggest source of financial pressure, with meat and poultry causing the most stress. As the United States celebrates its 250th anniversary on July 4th, the Independence Day cookout offers a timely measure of what classic Americana costs.